Reddit Closes 'Jailbait' Pic Site, Allows Others to Remain

Conde Nast's Reddit site has closed a subsite devoted to what it calls "jailbait," prompting controversy among the site's users. Meanwhile, Reddit still maintains forums devoted to teens in lingerie, and even purported photos of dead children.

Conde Nast's Reddit site has closed a subsite devoted to what it calls "jailbait," prompting controversy among the site's users. Meanwhile, Reddit still maintains forums devoted to teens in lingerie, and even purported photos of dead children.

Erik Martin, a community manager for Reddit who goes by the name "hueypriest," said that he banned the /r/jailbait portion of the site because of a conflict with the subsite's moderators, not because of the content.

Meanwhile, the site maintains "reddits," or subsites, of "male jailbait", "Asian jailbait", "trapbait", and even a site devoted to pictures of dead children. The latter site earned the comment "This is the most f---ed up subreddit ive ever seen."

The "jailbait" reddit is certainly not the only public site with pictures designed to shock, offend, and titillate; other examples include 4chan.org, among others. Still, the images do stand out in comparison to Conde Nast's other publications, which include Vanity Fair, Vogue, Self, GQ, Wired, and The New Yorker, among other magazines. It also owns Ars Technica, a technology site, as well as Reddit.

The French edition of Vogue, however, recently published photos of Thylane Loubry Blondeau, a 10-year-old French girl who was posed as a model in a red dress, lying on a tiger-skin rug.

Conde Nast did not publish contact information for representatives on the site, and no one answered calls at the main switchboard after hours.

The reason that the jailbait reddit was disbanded, Martin wrote, was because of a disagreement with the moderators of the reddit. "I banned the subreddit because of some of the mods who were added and the specific situation that was created with them," he wrote. "Many of them had been repeatedly banned form reddit for various reasons. The situation was out of control. I offered to unban /r/jailbait if those mods were removed."

Martin also wrote, in a post authored a month ago, that he felt that the "/r/jailbait" and "/r/picsofdeadkids" reddits were "gross". Martin wrote that he believed that the reddits were so-called trolls, designed to elicit a reaction.

"We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally quesitonable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this," Martin wrote.

And that's the argument that some users of the site used, even if they claimed that they never visited the reddits in question.

"Just because I don't LIKE to hear people saying racist things doesn't mean they don't have the right to say them," "blueasclepius" wrote. "Freedom of Speech is something that should make everyone's ears twitch when they hear things like, "some compromises" being used with it."

Although the images are labeled "NSFW" (Not Safe for Work), the moderators of the "asianjailbait" reddit, for example, request that the models be under 18, and not contain any nudity. "Please make every effort to ensure that the girls are jailbait. Questionable posts will not be removed, but will instead be handled by the community through downvotes," the rules say.

Pictures on the Reddit site's "jailbait" reddit include teens in lingerie, underwear, and swimsuits.

"These rules are tentative and are subject to change as the subreddit expands," the rules add. "Please mail me any suggestions or concerns."

As one user noted, the "jailbait" reddit was the first result that came up in Google when users searched for "jailbait".

"It was definitely one of the major places people went when looking at underage girls in bikinis," kafka201 wrote. "Probably not mostly underage guys looking for similarly aged girls."

However, as Gawker noted, teens themselves have a right to upload racy photos to online sites, even if they are underage. In the case of T.V. v. Smith-Green Community School Corp., an Indiana judge ruled that a school could not ban two girls from extracurricular activities for uploading pictures of themselves in lingerie, while simulating sex acts.

About the Author

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, require... See Full Bio

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